Mom, Josh said slowly, what did you buy from Derek at my wedding.
Elaines sister closed the album, and then, because forty relatives around a fire pit were waiting, she opened it again to the last page, the one Hannah the photographer had glued in, and the truth came out under the Maine stars.
The photo showed Elaine handing Derek, the best man, a thick white envelope, and Derek handing her back a small black box. Hannah had written one line beneath it. I asked Derek what was in the box. He told me.
My mother in law had paid her own sons best man, on the wedding day, to be her inside man against the marriage, and the little black box was a voice recorder she had him wear through the reception to catch anything she could someday use to pull my husband away from me.
Two thousand dollars, Derek admitted, when Josh turned on him. She said she wanted to know what your wifes family really thought of you. She said if I recorded the toasts and the private moments, she would find something. She paid me to wear it all night.
Elaine had not stopped at editing me out of a coffee table album. That was only the part I could see. From the day we married, she had been building a case, financing a quiet little campaign to end my marriage before it started, and she had bought a groomsman to do it.
Josh stood very still by the fire. He had told me, at Christmas, not to be dramatic, it was just a coffee table. He was not calling it just a coffee table now.
Because the thing about a woman who edits you out of the altar photo in case things change is that she is not predicting a change. She is planning one.
Hannah, our photographer, had refused to be fully part of it. Elaine had paid her extra to erase me from the family album, and Hannah had done the edit because a job is a job, but she had kept one honest photograph, the one of the envelope and the black box, because something about the whole arrangement had not sat right with her. When I called and asked who did the editing, she decided the bride deserved the truth more than the mother in law deserved her secret.
Josh and I are still married. That is the part I am proudest of, and it was not automatic. He had to choose, that night, between the mother who edited his wife out of his wedding and the wife who was still in it. He chose, out loud, in front of forty relatives, and he has not wavered since.
We had a new album made. The real one. Me at the altar, in his arms, in every photo where I belong. Hannah printed it herself, and she did not charge us for the reprints.
Elaine is not welcome at our table until she can sit at it without a recorder and an envelope. She has not managed it yet.
The black box is gone. The album that erased me is in a landfill where it belongs. And the first dance photo, the real one, the one where Josh is holding me instead of holding nothing, hangs in our hallway.
She wanted something timeless. She got it. Just not the way she planned.